We heard a conversation between an immigrant and some students, about a Federal Europe. The pro-federalist students mentioned that Europe doesn’t have its own Facebook or big social media companies. The foreigner countered that it did, and allegedly, the European Union killed them.
Politics all over the world tries to kill social media. Yet, a social media company created in Romania could succeed. Look at the success stories from Estonia, Skype (was killed by Microsoft when sold) is known throughout the world and even became its own verb. Bolt already was a verb, so it didn’t change the language, but we all know what “get a Bolt” means.
There are other electronic brands in Europe that compete. Open Source 3D animation studio, Blender, is based in Holland. Sure, it is a non-profit, but many other non-profits have failed when competing against giants like Adobe and Autodesk. You might have even used a Romanian antivirus company without knowing it.
Still not convinced? Here are some European Social media companies that could have beaten Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, or YouTube if not for internal flaws and lack of local support. (I won’t be including Russian brands like Yandex or Rutube because censorship protects them against competition. And China has some successes worth mentioning, but it is not in Europe.)
LinkedIn Competitors
Europe had a few LinkedIn competitors. Some were started by government subsidy, like SunTzu (or something like that) which had British government funding. They naturally died because their expertise was in how to get subsidy, and they failed to hire anyone who would grow. They also refused to acknowledge that they were a LinkedIn competitor.
Xing is like the German LinkedIn. It still exists. Why doesn’t it get news? It is very restrictive. It is hard to post something on there unless you can categorise it into very narrow categories. If I had a German company, a German University, or a German consulting firm
Viadeo
A LinkedIn competitor that basically failed because of lack of quality control. On a technical level, it offered everything that LinkedIn did at the time, including message boards, the ability to communicate and have Q and A sessions, and so on. Unfortunately, its boards were filled with MLM scam.
You think LinkedIn is a clown show? So do I. But at least there is some moderation on LinkedIn, in LinkedIn groups. Viadeo had none. The spammer ruined it. But a few moderators could have saved it.
And French politicians and entrepreneurs didn’t use it the way American celebrities used LinkedIn. The best way to support local business is not with subsidy, but with patronage. If you want to learn from LinkedIn’s mistakes, get a moderators and market aggressively to real life influencers (like politicians and CEOs of big companies).
Shooting People
Why did Stage32 outlast Shooting People? Shooting People put too much emphasis on politics and contests, and not enough on getting people together. There were a few trolls you just trashed people, trashed ideas, trashed even the idea of raising money for a film through methods that would work, who should have been removed from the platform (I am thinking about the Llama, for one.)
Yes, Stage32 also had its trolls and leaches (mostly USA based, a few Europeans among them, but USA based, which makes a European alternative more attractive). But, it understood the market and found a way to monitise its leadership. I preferred Shooting People, on the whole, and I would love a platform without some of
Quant and other search engines
I used Quant as my default search engine. The problem is that it doesn’t spider enough pages. Most of the time when I do a search, I get a result, but its not always a great one. It is especially weak for news searches.
Retail Marketplaces
Okay, this is an overall thing about competitors to Amazon, eBay, and so on. A few do succeed within their local markets, and do adopt some great ideas, like pick-up-boxes (so people don’t have to be home to get a safe delivery.)
Search on retail websites
One thing they do weak, though, is search. If I am searching for a title of a book, that book should come up on top, not some kind of underwear that only vaguely resembles the book title. If I am searching for an author, then I expect to see books by that author, not napkins or candlesticks that begin with the same letter.
Facebook competitors
Ever heard of Hiives, Skyrock and Tuenti? If you are a student, planning to start your own social media company, I suggest you do your research paper on those and see why they failed. You can look into the garbage said about MySpace, but too much theory of gamification and social tensions won’t show the real reasons.
Find old users of those sites, ask them what brought them in and what made them leave. Do a proper interview, try to discover that those businesses could have
There were others too, in Belgium and so on. Most of these focused on dating, which was a huge flaw. People like to use thing to contact old friends, old relatives, old people. I want to say, “Anyone who tries to use social media for dating should be referred to a psychologist,” but I know one couple who met through social media. Only half of that couple is crazy. (Please don’t get offended if you’re reading this. Don’t go crazy.)
Seriously though, anything that focuses on dating has an inbuilt obselence. And that doesn’t work with social media. I know another couple that met on social media, but continues to use the platform. They are still together, which means they use social media for many other things. Single-use social media is silly.
The main flaws
European social media companies, in my view, had three main flaws. One, is they are often restrictive. They try to tell users what they should post, what they should do, and make it hard to just do your own thing.
The second is the lack of moderation. You need some way of getting rid of the trolls. Sure, there is bullying and content no one likes on even the successful platforms. But even Facebook would go out of business if half the content people saw was bullying and spam.
The third is a lack of business sense. Successful businesses attract people to their platforms. Users often do this themselves, by sharing pictures with friends, or whatever. But businesses need to make it friendly both for users and whoever finances the outfit (advertisers, subscribers, who knows.)
My advice
My advice is to delete all social media profiles. You can make any excuse you want, that you are creating a competing platform, that you are worried about privacy, or whatever. The truth is, social media is not necessary.
But, if you do build a better mousetrap, or social media platform, look at what has been tried before. Do not limit yourself to American social media giants that failed. Look at what worked in your own market, and why it stopped working, or failed to expand.
And explore how to create something that succeeds outside of the theory. Check if past projects followed the theory.
Beware that the “pro-Europeans” (who want to federalise Europe) will be marching this weekend on Saturday, 9th of May, at five pm. There might not be many of them, but traffic might be slower than usual if they go through the town center. Also, if they get what they want, a bad social media app will still fail. If they don’t, a good one could still succeed.
